Social Design

Jan Lachenmayer, Systematic Consulting Group
Claas Wenzlik, Systematic Consulting Group

You cannot not change the world.

We create and change the social world we live in every day. We either reinforce or change the way things are around us with every little thing we do – our social world is constructed by us, it is not divine. We call that Social Design.

Design, in this sense, is both a process and a result of any actions. Therefore it is much more included in the traditional meaning of the word: the shaping of products and services. In a broader definition design is everything that is human made – may it be things, relationships and organisations.

Social in this sense means related to people. We are social beings we do not live alone on a deserted island. Everyday we interact with people. Indeed, we as people cannot escape acting in relation to other people. This is what we understand as the inescapability of the others.

The social world we are living in is the result of the inescapability of the others. Because people cannot not interact, they create their social world consciously or not.
Our social world is being organised or organises itself. It becomes manifest in an uncountable numbers of social techniques on many different levels, e.g. democracy or rituals in a family. As time goes by some social techniques vanish and others arise.
‘For what tomorrow will be, no one know’ nonetheless the future is based on decisions we make today. From today’s perspective not only one future but multiple futures are possible. This is the individual experience of contingence: everything that is could be otherwise.

The implications are twofold. Firstly, it is not only the politicians, the managers, the so called decision-makers that influence and change the world. It is the ordinary people, the you and me’s that can make a difference. Secondly, it opens a great opportunity though a great responsibility. We cannot not change the world.
But how can we change the world consciously then? The key is to understand how we create our social world. What are the underlying beliefs, assumptions, mindsets, ways of thinking? Here the theory of the observer comes in. It implies that the creation of our world depends on how we observe our world. The observer has to be taken into account. Therefore we have to understand how we observe the world. Or in other
words, we have to observe how we observe. Self-recognition is the magic term.
We initiated a social design portal (www.SocialDesignSite.com) to develop a praxeology of social design and social life. Praxeology in terms of Bateson (1972) as the linking of theory and practice on a meta-logical level. How do people organise their social life? How do they design their social world?

By observing the (self-)exploration of social design via social design portal we found a clustering around the following categories systems of living, web-based, art-based,
cultural-based , micro and what we call social experiments. These categories are made by us and could be chosen differently. However we tried to find certain characteristics to describe the respective initiatives and therefore it is not a definition it is a just description.

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